A variety of portable media devices are being developed to support high-definition (HD) video. Compared to most other display resolutions, encoding and decoding of HD video are both memory-intensive and power-intensive. For example, the bitrate for H.264 video at 1080p resolution may be up to 20 Mbps. Thus, a 10-minute video clip at the 1080p display resolution may consume up to 1.5 gigabytes of memory. Similarly, processing of HD video typically consumes power at a greater rate than processing of lower-resolution video. A user's preference for HD video in a portable media device may thus be limited by the memory capacity, battery life, and or processing capacity of the portable media device.